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Chapter 2: The Way Is Perfect

Throw all knowledge, because knowledge is needed only when you have to do something. When you don’t have to do anything, what knowledge is needed? You don’t need any knowledge. You need just to have a feel, a knack - how to drop, how not to be. And when I say “how” I don’t mean technically, when I say “how” I don’t mean that you have to know a technique. You have simply to search for it.

I will suggest two things which will be helpful. One is sleep: try to find out how sleep happens, how you fall into sleep. You may have a ritual but that ritual is not creating sleep, it helps. Everybody has a ritual. Small children have their rituals, a particular posture. Every child has his own posture, he may take his thumb in his mouth. It does not give you sleep, but it helps for that child - he has found his own ritual. If you follow that child you will not fall into sleep.

And the same is the case with all techniques of meditation - everybody finds his own ritual. It helps because it gives you a climate. You put off the light, you have a certain incense burning in the room, you have a certain type of pillow, a certain height, softness. You have a certain type of rug, you have a certain posture. This all helps, but this is not the cause of it. If somebody else follows it, this may become a hindrance. One has to find one’s own ritual.

A ritual is simply to help you to be at ease and wait. And when you are at ease and waiting, the thing happens. Just like sleep godliness comes to you, just like godliness love comes to you. You cannot will it, you cannot force it.

And your whole life has become a problem because you have learned too much how to do things. You have become very efficient in mechanical things because they can be done, but you have become absolutely inefficient in human things, because they cannot be learned and they cannot be technically done; you cannot become efficiency experts in them.

Whenever there is a mechanical thing to do there can be a training place for it, but consciousness cannot be trained. And you go after gurus, this and that, to find some technique, some mantra, so that you become enlightened. There is no mantra which can make you enlightened.

This is the mantra: Sosan says that you will have to become more understanding: less will, more let-go; less effort, more effortlessness; less doing of the conscious, more swimming in the unconscious.

Now try to understand the sutra:

When the deep meaning of things is not understoodthe mind’s essential peace is disturbed to no avail.

If you understand, there will be peace. If you don’t understand, there will be disturbance, tension and anguish. Whenever somebody is in anguish it shows he has not understood the thing, the deeper meaning of things.

And you go on accusing others, that because of them you are in anguish. Nobody here is in anguish because of others. You are in anguish because of your nonunderstanding or your misunderstanding.